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As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

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Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#141
post #105
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Username is fsckboy. > I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. Checks out.

"fsck - check and repair a Linux file system" ( https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck ) The -b -o -y must be undocumented flags.

I was going to be fsckboi but was afraid I'd lose half my audience

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#143
post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

The revolution devoured its children:

In the early years, technically inclined individuals / power users were the early adopters of the Internet and Google and thus arguably a high percentage of users. So it adapted to that user demographic.

The early demographic (as is so often the case) enabled the revolution, and it became mainstream. And the early demographic is left behind.

Google (with all of it's measuring, automation and various generations of algorithmic and machine accelerated learning evolved from being optimized for early adopters to being optimized for the mainstream.

Maybe some of these links will help? ;-)

https://www.google.com/search?q=learn+to+talk+like+a+teenage...

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#144

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscrib…

>twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit

/hacker news

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#145
post #38

I'm old, very educated, very experienced, technical, etc. My assistant is young and none of the above. She finds everything very quickly through internet searches. However-it-is that google is interpreting search terms, that's how her brain works. I told her about a house I drove by that looked like a cool Halloween house. While I was still telling her basics about it, she was already pulling up pictures of it. I had…

I don't google as much, but I regular develop my random thoughts like that with ChatGPT. If I heard about your melting house, I'd try to generate it's picture with Dalle.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#146
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

This happened with the World of Warcraft subreddit. Any topic someone posted about, a gaming site was having ChatGPT (or whatever) write an article talking about how players were talking about X/Y/Z topic. Well... the subreddit caught on, and started trolling the shit out of the site by making up fake things "fans were excited about." https://www.engadget.com/redditors-troll-an-ai-content-farm-...

A related Internet malady that has cropped up lately: two or three people on Reddit mention that their brand-ABC phone has been having trouble communicating with their brand-XYZ car, or something like that. One of them wonders if it could have something to do with a recent phone OS update. By the next day, anyone searching for "ABC bluetooth dropouts" will get deluged with SEO'ed links to content farms with headlines like "Outraged users on Reddit blame recent ABC update for bricking their phones," accompanied by made-up stories with links pointing back to the same subreddit with the same handful of content-free comments.

This is going to get so much worse...

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#147
post #77
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Google still deserves a ton of credit. Online shopping is tricky, but information is incredibly easy to access, especially if you do know how to avoid clicking on Quora or WebMD style sites. Google does a great job of shepherding you towards information and at the very least gives you additional context that you can use to corroborate or tune your search.

Try searching for anything related to a recently released video game. Chat gpt spam has made it completely impossible. Even the reputable wikis are pushed down far enough to become very difficult to find.

And all the filler text...! When you search for something like "Cyberpunk O'Five location", you'll likely get a page that has the information, but instead of the answer "Reward for the Beat The Brat fight in Arroyo", you get a wall of text that likely starts with "Cyberpunk 2077 was released by CDR in 2022... The O'Five is one of the most powerful sniper rifles". The page will have the answer, but it will take substantial time to find it. It's awful.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#148
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of HNers are pretty out of touch with how the vast majority of people use the internet.

Is it wrong to want to be even further out of touch?

Well no, but you've only yourself to blame if you feel out of touch. Feel free to yell at them clouds.

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#149

It's always surprised me that confirmed SEO shenaniganery doesn't bring an instant ion-cannon strike from Google. I know they are apparently allergic to having a human ever decide anything ever. It's just that if I were them, with an infinite data lake to find the vendors' traces, trillion-dollar C-suite morals and the SEO was messing with the bottom line, there would be no quarter when a nest is uncovered. Delist ev…

A lot of "SEO shenaniganery" is basically "make your website better, for robots and for users".

Re: As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful, what happens to SEO?

#150

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

Which is ironic, considering the Internet was also "ruined" in 1993 when ISPs gave everyone Usenet access, flooding the Reddit equivalent of the day (if Reddit were the only real forum) with anonymous users who cared not for cultural norms. Prior to that, it was mostly people posting under their real name with their real workplace or college in their email address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
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